Paving Update

[robby]

Creepy, cold and foggy weather until this afternoon. I did a lot of heavy excavation today, and at this point, my body still feels pretty good. I used about half the dirt filling up Pogi's gopher diggings all over the place.

He's really a digging fool, and thankfully, his most recent projects are beyond the fence. He never catches a gopher by digging, but maybe it's just for fun. Halo's smarter, and gave up digging very quickly, and Halo's the dog that actually catches critters.

Next thing on my paving project is to get out a line level, and carefully measure the depth as I excavate, so as to get the proper slope established. All the primers say that the preparation, which I'm doing now, is the most critical step.

Comments

[ccjohn.livejournal.com]

I found out why people hate deer, and woodchucks and rabbits this year. If you work your ass off planting stuff, and it's growing well, and an animal eats it you are going to want to kill said animal.

Except I like woodchucks. They're fat, stupid-looking and don't care. They're funny to watch. They have a dignity.

Q. Is a gopher same as a woodchuck?

[robby.livejournal.com]

Gophers are plant-eating burrowing rodents. They're about the size of rats. When I wasn't as busy, I would go out every morning and bait them with poison, and I could keep them under control. Now, the one dog, Pogi, is hunting them, and makes a terrible mess when he starts digging. He knows where they are, though, and I'll let him show me when I have the time to start baiting them again.

He loves to dig, and makes happy little yelps, with his body halfway underground. I want happy dogs, so my plan is to control the gophers inside the fence and let Pogi dig to his hearts content out by the road.

And the poison that I use wouldn't hurt a dog, even if they ate a dead gopher, which they never do, anyway.

[robby.livejournal.com]

I lost my whole almond crop to birds, last year. This year, I'm going to buy a mechanical owl and put it in the tree. You can get variations that have a dying blackbird struggling in the owl's talons.

[ccjohn.livejournal.com]

I don't like birds much. The bigger hawks look cool, but the rest just make a racket and carry diseases. That sucks about the almonds.

Blackbird in the talons. Heh. Somehow makes me think of a political metaphor or cartoon.

[robby.livejournal.com]

I tend to like birds, and I think the culprits eating my almonds are yellow-billed magpies, which are very smart birds. I'll try to outsmart them with animatronics and maybe recorded distress calls.